The future socialist society and working class struggles today are inherently linked. Socialist organisational forms will not spring from nowhere on the day of the revolution, rather they develop in the process of struggling against capitalism, and so will reflect the way this struggle is waged.
Self-Management
Self-management can be used to refer to both economic and social self-management by the working class after the revolution, and the self-management of workers in their struggle against capitalism. In short, self-management refers to the concept that at all levels workers must have direct democratic and collective control over their own lives, workplaces, and communities. Through self-management, the ideals of socialism are connected to genuinely democratic organisational forms which facilitate rather than hinder the ability of the working-class to collectively run society.
On the level of the struggle against capitalism, self-management refers to working-class organisations and movements under the participatory, democratic, and collective control of their members. For example, today by and large our trade union movement is not self-managed by their members, but rather is controlled by small bureaucracies who make decisions in place of the wider membership.
To develop the ability to self-manage all of society after the revolution the working class must engage in activity and organisational forms in today's struggles which nurture this capacity. Without a nurturing of this capacity prior to the revolution, the working class will likely remain reliant on the management of bureaucracies, rulers, and the State to act in its stead. To expect the working class to develop their ability to self-manage at some unforeseen future juncture while dictating that they should today continue to rely on the management of small ruling groups or cliques is utopian. It is only through the concrete experience of self-management - which is to say collective control of decision-making - that self-management develops. From this, we can say that a self-managed society can only emerge through a workers struggle that is itself self-managed.
In terms of economic and political self-management, we refer to the need for workers after the revolution to have direct control through mass assemblies over their labour, workplace, communities, and society itself. From each self-managed workplace and community, delegates can be nominated to attend congresses and higher bodies combining industrial and community representatives on increasingly large scales. Through these delegated bodies bottom-up economic and social planning is facilitated to cover all aspects of production, consumption, and social need. Large-scale social coordination is achieved through self-management and through it, alienation and the need for minority rule is abolished.
There are two further points to consider when discussing self-management. Firstly, it must be stressed that self-management as a form does not in itself ensure socialist content or politics. But neither does socialist politics alone overcome the realities of class society, particularly if they remain rooted in managerial, authoritarian, and capitalist forms of organisation.
Socialist politics and self-management must be linked together as two sides of the same coin. Both remain limited without the other.
Secondly, we stress that self-management does not reflect a fetishisation for completely decentralised and small-scale industry or social coordination. Differing industries and areas will require more or less levels of centralisation depending on their conditions. We do not seek a priori to glorify either centralisation or decentralisation. Rather anarchism seeks to balance centralised coordination with autonomy which is accomplished through the organisational form of federalism.
Federalism
Federalism maintains that organisation and coordination should be freely achieved and structured from the bottom-up. Beginning from the bottom, rooted in mass assemblies, workers based in their workplaces, unions and communities can federate together, creating federations of increasingly large scale and complexity. Each level of the federation can elect delegates to higher bodies tasked with coordination and the execution of tasks. These higher bodies do not rule over and control the bodies below them. Rather they exist to act out the tasks and decisions mandated to them. Should these mandated responsibilities not be met then the lower bodies would maintain the right to recall and censor their delegates and to reject the decisions made on their behalf.
Importantly, federalism is not a repudiation of accountability. Each part of a federal body must be required to act in line with the principles and agreements underpinning the federation. Federalism provides the basis to connect the self-management of a specific workplace, union, or neighbourhood, through increasing levels of federation, all the way to the level of the national and international. Federalism represents the mechanism through which the working-class is able to collectively self-manage all aspects of society.
While federalism is often counter-posed to centralism, we do not believe this is necessarily the case. If centralism is taken to refer to central coordination, then federalism is simply a manner for ensuring that central coordination remains rooted in workers' self-management. The centralism that federalism opposes is one in which the central bodies of social organisation are vested with executive control over the whole. This “centralism” limits freedom and self-management, and creates a body of executives with privileges and decision-making authority separate from the wider body. The result is a clique ruling over those below them, the negation of freedom and the reemergence of class dynamics.